


Reunion

by Valaxiom



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: AI, AI Fragments, Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Post-Season 13 Finale, Self-Sacrifice, Soliloquy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:10:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7478259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valaxiom/pseuds/Valaxiom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moments before fragmenting himself to save his friends, Epsilon allows himself to finally confront his greatest regret and his greatest failure. Character death is implied and canon.  Spoilers for the end of Season 13.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> Poor Epsilon. He can never quite get it right.

Of all the things he’d expected to feel moments before his own deconstruction and complete erasure, Epsilon-Church had not expected regret. Maybe anger at being backed into a choiceless situation (it wasn’t like he could just let those idiots die, could he?), or despair that he wouldn’t get to see the end, or fear of what would happen next (to him, to his friends, to those assholes they were all going to fuck up). Epsilon had not expected to feel regret, and if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have anticipated harbouring those feelings for the long-gone memory of a ghost.

It was Tex. It was always Tex. It always came back to Tex. Sure, he may have let her memory go, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t stop pondering the puzzle of their relationship. Church and Tex couldn’t escape each other, not in any of their incarnations. He cringed to recall the messes he’d dragged her into, the pain he’d subjected himself and his friends to, the things he had done to her... Well, the things they had done to her. All of them. Epsilon, Alpha, the Director: the many facets of the man called Leonard Church, none of whom were good at letting go. Epsilon knew, because he had all the memories of the other two, and the useless skill of perfect hindsight that could have saved them all this trouble. Epsilon could try to dispute their similarities, citing his own ability to move on from the past as personal growth that set him apart from his predecessors, but the fact remained that Tex was gone, and he was to blame.

So many years of chasing someone through hell and high water, through sand and snow and swamps, through bullets and basic training and blood and a box canyon in the middle of nowhere.

And what did he have to show for it?

Epsilon was never meant to be a full AI. He was a fragment of the Alpha’s memory, composed of even more fragments. The stresses placed upon his holographic systems and man-made intelligence had never been meant for him alone. That was part of the reason Project Freelancer had imploded in such a spectacular manner- on their own, none of the fragments were truly capable of handling themselves. An artificial intelligence composed of one defining trait-

(Failure)

(Deceit)

(Logic)

(Fear)

(Trust)

(Happiness)

(Rage)

(Ingenuity)

(Memory)

-was doomed to self-destruct. Doomed to failure, just like poor, long-dead Allison’s shadow. And the memory of her shadow.

Epsilon could still remember her from that day on Sidewinder, before they both got trapped in the memory unit. Epsilon-Tex, or Beta, had been beautiful. She’d been deadly, she’d been fast, she’d been perfect, but it had all been for nothing.

(“She died in her real life, and that's all the Director ever remembered of her. So now, no matter how tough she is, no matter how hard she fights, she's always going to  _fail_! Because that's what she's based on. No matter what she's doing, or what she's trying to accomplish,  _just_  when her goal is within her reach, it gets yanked away. Every. Single. Time. Can you _imagine_ what that's like?”)

Like Leonard Church, like Alpha, like the Director, he had been completely incapable of helping or saving her. There was some kind of ironic bullshit poetry to that, he supposed. Watching helplessly as his (both metaphorical and literal) other half got stabbed through the helmet-

(Shards flew through the air)

(Epsilon was lying in the snow)

(She went limp)

-had not been a pleasant experience. His rash decision to follow her into the failing memory unit had been for nothing. The whole damn idea had turned into an elaborate commit-the-AI-equivalent-of-suicide-and-also-find-inner-peace. Even that had backfired; he hadn’t told Tex that he loved her (because he did, even though it was a completely fucking insane kind of love), and he hadn’t had the balls to finally say goodbye. She’d always hated goodbyes...

The best that Church had been able to summon was, “I forget you.” Three little words, and they took all his energy to choke out. Epsilon had thought that he'd finally ended the infinite loop of Church and Tex, and Allison and Leonard, and Alpha and Beta, but all he’d been able to feel was despair. When he’d been rescued by the Reds and Blues-

(“I was at _peace_! I had it figured out, it was over! _Put me back_!”)

-he’d been pissed. By letting go of Allison’s memory and letting himself die with the memory unit, he’d almost gotten to rest at last.

Then he’d been roped into Carolina’s very own personal revenge-and-redemption arc. Poor kiddo; with a dad like Epsilon’s AI’s template, she’d been pretty messed up. At least she hadn’t inherited Tex’s unfortunate fate, or her father’s inability to let go of the past. In a way, she and Epsilon were siblings. Except that Epsilon had been in love with the split-personality AI memory of Carolina’s long-deceased mother. And he was a copied hologram of her emotionally-distant father’s personality.

Man, their "family" was fucked up.

Crashing on a planet in the forgotten ass-end of the universe was exactly what their group should have expected. Being dragged along with his asshole friends on yet another insane suicide mission was honestly nothing more than he would expect. Chorus was a shithole, but at least they’d been together.

And then he started falling apart. Rampancy finally started to whisper in his ear, and Epsilon didn’t want to go the way he’d seen the original Sigma go. It was better to go out in a blaze of glory, to be remembered for helping his friends, than to succumb to the raging madness that awaited every artificial intelligence.

What happened to AI when they got permanently erased? If AI could sleep, he was sure that he'd have nightmares about the EMP that had destroyed all of his other pieces. His brothers and sisters were impossible to recover, so in a way, it was like death. Epsilon assumed that they simply ceased to exist, but an afterlife of sorts might be nice. An eternity in some place like Blood Gulch didn’t sound too bad, not if he had his friends there with him. Maybe the rest of the Alpha’s fragments were there, just waiting for him to show up and be the last piece of the puzzle.

Maybe Tex was waiting for him on the other side.

He was tired.


End file.
